Alphabits
by Trinity Day
Summary: 7 complete and standalone ficlets about Max and Alec covering almost the entire first third of the alphabet. Partial (and belated) response to nickledime17's alphabet challenge.


Many years ago, nickledime17 posted an alphabet challenge for Max and Alec lovers. Many days ago, I was transferring files and discovered I'd written responses for A through H (except for E) but never posted them. They are all gen, ranging from 100 to 1000 words. Cold is an AU and the reason the whole story is rated M-everything else is T at a max. Girl is crack and contains the usual level of canonical Max/Logan longing. Hero takes place immediately after Bag 'Em.

* * *

**Anything**

"What I? don't, what I don't get," Sketchy slurred, wagging his finger somewhere in the general vicinity of Alec and the table, "is why you work here."

Alec understood Sketchy to mean Jam Pony, not Crash where they'd been drinking for the past few hours. He shrugged. "Why not?"

"You could do _anything, _but you work as a bike." Sketchy nearly knocked over his beer when he waved his arms to indicate just how many possibilities Alec had. Max's quick reflexes saved it before she decided to save him by claiming it as her own.

"It's not that bad of a job," he said mildly. "You've all worked here for years."

"Can't do better," Sketchy admitted.

"It's not that bad a job," Alec repeated, since his real reason—the sector pass—would probably raise a few more questions and might actually be remembered in the morning when Sketchy woke up.

"Bad hours, bad weather, bad money."

"Good company," Max said, though she deliberately looked away from Alec and towards Original Cindy, who was currently with her hottie of the night over at the pool tables.

Alec grinned at her anyway. "Right back at you, Maxie."

"Horri-bad boss," Sketchy added.

"Normal's not that bad," Alec said. "I've had worse bosses."

Max met his eyes and briefly Alec raised his glass slightly. Max didn't reciprocate, but she also didn't scowl or roll her eyes, only looked contemplative and a little bit sad, which Alec counted as a victory even if she didn't return the toast. Then she said something that made him wonder if he'd only imagined the moment of solidarity a few short seconds ago.

"You're only saying that because Normal's in love with you." There was a distinct vein of nastiness behind the teasing.

"You're just jealous," he said dismissively.

"Of you?" Max asked. "Puh-lease. As if I'd want Normal tripping over himself for my approval."

"How'd you do that?" Sketchy asked earnestly. "He doesn't even know my name."

"He knows your name, Sketchy," Max assured him.

"My real one," Sketchy corrected her, morosely.

"I don't think Normal does names," Alec said in attempts to cheer Sketchy up. Their co-worker could get very down when drinking, and had the bad habit of making everyone around him depressed, too.

"And we don't use his, either," Max added, joining in Alec's attempts to cheer Sketchy.

"I guess you're right," Sketchy said. "But how do you get up in the morning."

Alec turned to Max, hoping she'd been able to follow the conversation better than he had. Above average intelligence or not, there were some leaps of logic that Alec just couldn't figure out.

Luckily for his ego, neither could Max. She shrugged, having turned to Alec in hopes that he would be able to clue her in, and then they both looked back at Sketchy and asked: "What?"

Sketchy frowned, clearly not expecting a follow-up question. "What?" he asked in return.

Alec was willing to let it go, but Max, if he didn't know better, had some bloodhound DNA in her. Once she caught whiff of something, she was never willing to let it go.

"How do we get up in the morning?" Max said.

Sketchy, however, didn't recognize it as a question he'd just asked them, so he answered it seriously.

"I dunno. Sometimes I just want to stay in bed forever. I hate to have to get up and go to work and what? But I hafta go to work. So that's why I get up. It's the worst feeling, waking up and knowing you hafta go to work. It's a trap. It's a big, rat race trap. Just once I wish, I just wish..." Sketchy petered off, unable to vocalize what exactly it was that he was wishing for.

"Then don't," Alec advised him.

"Not all of us have that option," Max told him. "Not all of us have Normal wrapped around our pinky fingers."

Alec just looked at her. "Which one of us gets fired roughly once a week, exactly?"

Max conceded he had a point by nodding her head a fraction of a degree. "Still, you can't just never show up for work."

"That's not what I meant. Waking up in the morning and knowing that you can do anything you want to do? You can go to work or not and your boss will only bluster? Maybe he'll finally get up the courage to fire you, but then wha? All you have to do is go look for another job. That's not being trapped. That's a reason to get up in the morning."

He held Max's eyes, knowing that she recognized the lack of choice he was alluding to that they'd both experienced at Manticore. He tried toasting her again. This time Max acknowledged Alec's raised glass, moving her own (well, Sketchy's former) in response. The moment was ruined by Sketchy, whom they had almost forgotten was still there.

"I don't get it." It wasn't surprising that Sketchy was confused. Not just because he was drunk, but because most of that conversation had been between Alec and Max and them alone.

Instead of addressing Sketchy's concern, Alec changed the subject. Clearing his throat, he said, "Speaking of doing anything I want, Missy over there has been looking my way all night.

Max groaned, but Alec ignored her and finished his drink so he could go join the redhead at the bar. He hoped that when he woke up the next morning, part of the anything that he could do that day was Missy.

* * *

**Brick**

"This seems like an awful lot of trouble for you just to throw a brick," Alec commented, drumming his fingers on the card table that doubled as Max's vanity these days.

Max scowled, but she was too busy trying to smooth down an erstwhile hair to do anything else. "I'm not throwing a brick," she explained for the fifth time that day. "I'm setting the cornerstone."

Alec shrugged. He could never understand how a girl could spend so much time primping when she was genetically enhanced to look stunning even in army fatigues.

"Stone, brick, whatever. They're still all rocks."

"The cornerstone," Max continued meaningfully, as though she hadn't been expecting Alec's interruption and paused for it, "of a new transgenic cultural centre, which is a huge step forward in ordinary-transgenic relations."

"They're only offering us a museum because anything else would require actual work on their side," Alec said cynically.

"If that's how you feel, then why are you even coming?" she asked in exasperation, giving up on her hair and placing her hands on her hips.

Alec grinned at her with his most charming smile, the one that had not yet once made Max swoon, though that left most other girls (and several guys, including their former boss) putty in his hand. He jumped off the desk and smoothed out his tux.

"What can I say, Maxie? I'm bored."

* * *

**Cold**

"X5-452," she rattles off.

There are more numbers than that. 332960073452. A series of bars on the back of her neck that she learned how to decipher about the same time that she learned the letters of the English alphabet.

She's rarely asked for the rest of it, however, since most of them can't read the codes without some external assistance.

A tech explained it to her once. Those twelve numbers are the sum of her existence.

33 is her series, another way of saying that she is an X5, thirty-third in the line of prototypes to make the ultimate American soldier.

296 is her classification. She is a combat model, like the rest of the X5s. She is a night model, able to function on even fewer hours of sleep than most others. She is an infiltrator, ideal for solo operations.

0073 are DNA markers, a key to who and what donated genetic material to her cocktail. The tech supposes that somewhere in the facility, there are files that explain these numbers further, but he hasn't seen it and he doesn't care.

452 are junk numbers. Originally, they described the sequence in which embryos were cooked up in the labs, but as more and more transgenics survived infancy and their handlers realized just how much of a mouthful it was to call them by their full barcode each and every time, the scientists started taking shortcuts.

The first to share her DNA markers died before reaching its first birthday, complications of Myelodysplasia (common in earlier transgenics, but eradicated by the time the X4s were rolled out).

The second had been identified as an anomaly very early on, but had survived until its sixth year, at which point it lost a fight with another anomaly and had to be put down.

Neither of them had been Xs.

"State your designation," they order.

She recites it perfectly.

Inside, she screams, "Max! Max! My name is Max!"

She doesn't say this out loud, not anymore.

She wonders if that's the beginning.

-452-

Alec liked to talk. It didn't take people long to realize this when they first met him.

He was always going on about something, often how great he was or how many girls he'd slept with, even how easy life was for him. Others might have hated him for it if it weren't for his undeniable charm and the silver tongue that was able to talk him out of almost as many scrapes as it talked him into. She might have hated him for it, except she knew what it was like to have a voice for the first time in your life.

Not that it ever stopped her from kicking his ass when his gabbing brought guards down on them because everyone else in the world knew that heists work better when you're quiet.

But one thing he never talked about was his time in psy-ops. Aside from a few pithy remarks about how she couldn't understand, he shut her out completely, tried to act as if the experience had never happened.

She doubts he ever knew just how much that gave away.

-452-

She wonders why Manticore put her with him. They knew the history. There were reports, collected confessions from everyone involved. Everyone knew how close they'd been while working together in pursuit of that impossible dream. They even brought them back together, kicking and clawing and bleeding, Max collapsing seconds after Alec did, the tasers too much for her body.

-452-

"Alec," she tries calling him once. That bemused expression, even though they were alone, without Manticore, without cameras, without even strangers on the street around to hear them, was so unlike him that it shut her down.

That bemused, foreign expression, not the fear of getting caught, not the fear of punishment and reprisal, that expression was the reason she never tried calling him that again.

-452-

"Mandy," he croons, his tongue taking especial pleasure in the second syllable, a promise of things to come. The intonation is so much like the way he used to say her name. "Maxie." She wonders why she ever resented him for doing so.

She melts a bit and she knows that the marks have fallen for the idea that they're young and in love and without a care in the world.

"Mandy," he calls her later, when they're alone, using that same inflection, staring at her so intensely that even she might believe they truly are that love-sick couple their cover calls for.

She's too grateful of the way he thrusts into her, even if the technique is nothing like the way she used to hear his conquests boast about.

She's too willing to respond to a name that is not her own, even as she refuses to call him anything at all.

-452-

Transgenics have a core temperature of 101.8 degrees, but when she lies there, listening to him snore softly beside her, it's all she can do to stop from shivering.

* * *

**Daughter**

Alec was against the meet from the start and wasted no time in telling her so.

"It's a stupid idea."

"I'm going." Max didn't even look at him when she said it, continuing to stuff clothes and money into a bag. As always, she didn't give a second thought to bringing a weapon, relying on her superior strength and hand-to-hand skills, despite months of fighting equally matched Familiars and even the odd renegade transgenic.

Alec grabbed her wrist, pulling her so close that their noses touched and she had to stare into his hard, hazel eyes. "You're not."

"She might be my mother!" Max shouted, yanking her wrist free and following it up with a sweep of her leg that Alec jumped to avoid.

"She might have given birth to you," Alec roared back. "It's not the same thing. She was just a convenient, well-paid womb. She's not going to just open her arms to you and make everything A-OK. 'Sorry for dropping you off at Manticore, honey,'" he mocked. "'Why don't I just make you some chocolate-chip cookies?'"

He grabbed her arms, driving her back. She fought at first before giving in, using the momentum to send him flying into the brick wall instead of her.

"You don't understand. You can't understand."

The look Alec gave her begged to differ. She wiped it off his face with three punches, the first two fake outs that he anticipated, the last one glancing off his gut, strong enough to wind him.

He didn't stay down long, though, meeting her next lunge with a side step, sending her into the wall.

"I understand too well. You're obsessed with family. You have this picture in your head of 'brothers' who aren't in fucking love with you or a 'mother' who wouldn't be outside the gates screaming and burning effigies with the rest of them ordinaries and _life's not like that, Max_. Our lives even less."

She kicked out, trying to wipe him off his feet. Alec jumped in time, but Max didn't let up and both of them had to throw all their concentration into keeping the other from gaining the upper hand.

When it did finally end, an indeterminable time later and without any clear signal from either of them to show they were finished, the fight was a draw. Panting slightly, Max glared at Alec as she got off the ground, carefully putting weight on her right leg until she was satisfied that he hadn't given her a limp.

"I'm still going," she said, daring him to start the fight again.

Alec rotated his arm carefully in the shoulder blade, making sure everything was still working properly.

"I know," he said, still looking furious about the matter. But he packed two guns into her bag and came along with her anyway.

When they got to the meeting place, he was almost as on edge as Max was, although he hid it better. Only because she knew him so well could Max see just how tensely he held his shoulders or how close he kept his hand to his holster, ready to draw with only a split second's notice. His eyes scanned the area continuously.

"I still think you're crazy for coming here," he said. Oddly enough, that didn't make her tense any further, though it should have had her ready to fight again.

"You're the one that came with me," she retorted.

"Yeah, well," Alec said vaguely, unable to vocalize why he had to tag along.

It was okay, though. Max didn't need to hear the words, didn't need to hear his rationalizations. He was here and that was what counted.

She expected nothing less.

* * *

**Frosting**

"Don't worry," he says as he passes her the keys. "I jacked it from some really bad guys."

Max knows how he feels about her "stealing from criminals" bit—he's teased her enough about it—so Alec doesn't count that as a lie. She doesn't question him, at least, and Alec is mostly sure it isn't only because she needs the vehicle too badly to find the time to fight.

Besides, leaving your keys in the ignition to defrost the car when it was only a few degrees below freezing was stupid enough that it ought to count as criminal.

* * *

**Girl**

Alec woke up with a pair of tits on his chest. While that itself wasn't entirely too unusual, the fact that the tits in question were attached to his chest and not some blonde he'd taken home, was.

"Huh."

That was funny. He didn't think went to sleep at Manticore, not that even Manticore was this twisted.

He stumbled out of bed, his usual grace gone along with his usual leg length.

There were no mirrors in that room, so Alec had to go to the bathroom to confirm his suspicion.

Max's face was staring back at him.

"Fuck," he said in her voice.

-GIRL-

Max was a night model, which meant she needed only an hour's sleep each night to still be in peak condition. That was a good thing, as the coffee Alec had brewed to pass the time tasted like shit. He made a note to get some better stuff for her apartment.

Not that he was planning on doing this again.

"Morning, boo." O.C. yawned and stretched, making her way towards the bathroom and wearing even less than she did when she went out clubbing or trying to pick up honeys.

Alec was beginning to see the potentials of this body.

-GIRL-

Max's pager beeped a familiar number. By the time he'd found a payphone a few blocks away, the number had flashed four more times. It was just starting to beep again when he phoned back.

"Hey," he said casually. "It's me, hitting you back."

"What did you do?" The voice was only just recognizable as his normal one, partially because it was coming across a bad phone line but mostly because the cadence and accusatory tone was pure Max.

Alec relaxed, slightly. At least if he was tripping, he wasn't alone in his delusion.

"Should that be my line to you?" he quipped, mostly because Max wasn't there in person to smack him.

"Alec!"

Alec could only hope that he didn't whine like that when he was himself.

"I didn't do anything," he said, more seriously now.

"Then how?" Max asked.

"I don't know. Look, I'll come over and we'll figure this bitch out," he said, before hanging up and cutting off any further protests and accusations Max might have lobbed his way.

He then realized the second benefit to being in this body, and went to find the keys to Max's Ninja.

-GIRL-

Logan made them repeat the story for a fourth time. Alec knew he shouldn't expect humans to be as quick on the uptake as transgenics, but this was a little much even for someone who didn't have genetically modified reaction times and who hadn't been raised to react to rapidly changing scenarios as his life depended on it.

"You're... Max," he said, looking at Alec's body with something approaching fear.

"Yes." Alec's voice was clipped and impatient and Alec was just happy the lovey-dovey constipated expression was finally gone from Logan's face.

"How?" Logan asked.

"That's what you're here to find out." He went to pat Logan on the chest and stopped when he remembered. Logan and Max stopped when they remembered, too.

"This is awkward," Alec said. It earned him twin glares, but at least it kept them from looking at each other.

-GIRL-

Logan was doing his Eyes Only, evil-doers beware thing, so Alec was at Crash. Max was there, too, because she didn't want to be alone with Logan when she actually was able to touch the guy without him dying because they're not like that.

Alec recognized a lot of people at the bar, but it wasn't the usual set who nodded in acknowledgement or gave him the appreciative once over. There was some overlap: OC knew, but she still tried to act natural and offered her Boo a smile; Sketchy didn't, but waved enthusiastically anyway. Alec was more interested in doe-eyed brunette who walked into the bar halfway through his first drink, long admired but only recently broken up with her boyfriend and now on the rebound. She greeted Alec with a wink and a smirk that he was only too happy to return.

He pulled his gaze away from Varuni when Max slammed her beer down on the table, extra hard. She was drinking the cheap stuff because she wasn't a good sport. Alec was drinking the cheap stuff because he was.

"Stop it," she said.

"You know, I'm fine you and Logan taking advantage of this opportunity if you're fine with me taking advantage of this opportunity," Alec said.

Alec expected the punch to the shoulder since Max and Logan weren't like that but this was exactly what he and Max were like.

-GIRL-

It would go away on its own. The explanation was longer, so that Logan could impress Max with his amazing research skills, but that was the gist of it.

"Two or three days. Tops. Then you'll be yourselves again," Logan swore up and down.

"Two days!" Max whined.

"Or three," Alec reminded her. She punched him in the shoulder and Logan looked a lot more pained at the action than he usually did. But it was hard not to when his usual reaction was smug bastard.

"If touching that mask made us this way in the first place, it can change us back again," Max said even though none of Logan's research even hinted that might work.

"Or make the change permanent," countered Alec, just because he could.

Max glared. "Are you coming or what?"

Alec grabbed her leather jacket-tighter than he was used to but worth it for the way it made his tits look-and they bounced.

-GIRL-

Alec woke up and the tits were gone. He smiled and stretched and froze.

He tried the stretch again. His arms extended nicely, hitting a headboard that couldn't be Max's since it was more solid than her bars, and couldn't be his, because his bed didn't have one in the first place. His toes refused to curl properly—or at all. On further reflection, he realized that it wasn't just his toes that wouldn't follow his commands, but everything below his waist.

He fumbled around on what appeared to be a nightstand, since his vision was even blurrier than it had been that time Manticore studied the effects of toxoplasmosis.

When he found the glasses, a good look at his body confirmed his suspicions.

"Oh, come on!" he groaned in Logan's voice.

* * *

**Hero**

He'd given in, gone after the girl, saved the world (well, at least the part that mattered—his fellow transgenics).

He'd even stuck around for the clean-up, waited until Max's boyfriend showed with new papers for the young 'uns (and not so much as an offer to him, not that he'd take her up on it).

But now he was heading off in his brand new 1965 Chrysler Newport, ignoring the looks that Max gave him because he wasn't going to feel guilty for not buying her whole save the world spiel.

The hero gig really wasn't his thing.


End file.
